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Monday, October 13, 2014

The Wolf Within...

There's something I must admit to you. As a book reviewer I find myself reading books I would never in a million years have bought or picked up to read if they hadn't been offered to me for review, and A Wolf in the Soul by Ira T. Berkowitz is definitely one in that category.

Mystical, mythical, fantasy and science fiction genres aren't my favorites. But, like the proverbial Jewish joke, I do take advantage of whatever is offered for free. That's even how I began the diet that helped me lose fifteen 15 kilo (over thirty 30 pounds) a number of years ago. Bli eyin haraa, not to tempt the evil eye, but the weight has been kept off, and sometimes I've been surprised at how much I enjoyed or couldn't put down books I've read for review. A Wolf in the Soul is one of those.

Trust me when I say that a book about a werewolf is one of the last books I'd take, even if totally desperate for reading material. So nobody was more surprised than myself when I found it hard to put down. It wasn't that I felt obligated to finish it as quickly as possible to get it out of the house. There are quite a few books that never made it as book reviews. I stopped reading after the first few pages. Or I read them and couldn't find anything positive to say, so I just said nothing. I wouldn't waste my time on a totally negative review, but I have posted mixed ones.

So, I hope you're curious about what I could have liked about a werewolf book. There was an honesty in the character; it is a first person narrative. As peculiar as the wolf transformation was to me, the emotions he reveals are very real. The family dynamics and human relations depicted in the book are realistic.

I don't know if I fully understood what the author, Ira T. Berkowitz (and I didn't succeed in finding out more about him) wanted to bring across to the reader, but I believe it to be connected to the power of our individual free will. Our free will, controls us, which means that we have ultimate control over ourselves. We have control over our faith in G-d and our relationships with other people.

The bottom line here is that, yes, I do recommend the book, A Wolf in the Soul, for yourself and as a gift. It's a book about a personal struggle. The end doesn't wrap up the story into a neat package, which brings a realism fiction rarely offers. You can take the book's conclusion and begin a whole new book, which, no doubt, would be equally enthralling. Is there a "part two" in the works? I don't know, since I couldn't contact the author.